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As a marketer, you're often tasked with accomplishing two main goals: making beautiful content that builds your brand recognition and tells your story ... and generating qualified leads that will help you grow your business.

Posted by Imogen_DaviesAt Google’s Search On event in October last year, Prabhakar Raghavan explained that 15% of daily queries are ones that have never been searched before. If we take the latest figures from Internet Live Stats, which state 3.5 billion queries are searched every day, that means that 525 million of those queries are brand new. That is a huge number of opportunities waiting to be identified and worked into strategies, optimization, and content plans. The trouble is, all of the usual keyword research tools are, at best, a month behind with the data they can provide. Even then, the volumes they report need to be taken with a grain of salt – you’re telling me there are only 140 searches per month for “women’s discount designer clothing”? – and if you work in B2B industries, those searches are generally much smaller volumes to begin with. So, we know there are huge amounts of searches available, with more and more being added every day, but without the data to see volumes, how do we know what we should be working into strategies? And how do we find these opportunities in the first place? Finding the opportunities The usual tools we turn to aren’t going to be much use for keywords and topics that haven’t been searched in volume previously. So, we need to get a little creative — both in where we look, and in how we identify the potential of queries in order to start prioritizing and working them into strategies. This means doing things like: Mining People Also Ask Scraping autosuggest Drilling into related keyword themesMining People Also Ask People Also Ask is a great place to start looking for new keywords, and tends to be more up to date than the various tools you would normally use for research. The trap most marketers fall into is looking at this data on a small scale, realizing that (being longer-tail terms) they don’t have much volume, and discounting them from approaches. But when you follow a larger-scale process, you can […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has led many B2B marketers to shift their account-based marketing (ABM) objectives and tactics, according to recent research from ITSMA and the ABM Leadership Alliance. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

A customer's email address is a hard-won valuable asset--so you need to make sure the emails you send aren't bouncing or being ignored. Early on in 2021, follow these two pieces of advice. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

In 2021, the things companies say are extra important, and there are more places to say them than ever. Marketers are facing a massive demand for content. Avoid being overwhelmed: Focus on these three survival tactics. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

2020 is finally behind us. So where do B2B marketers go from here? The challenges from an upended year will continue to factor into strategies for 2021 and beyond--in these four areas in particular. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

The digital experience vendor takes on the name of one its recent acquisitions. Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

Building a website is, in many ways, an exercise of willpower. It’s tempting to get distracted by the bells and whistles of the design process, and forget all about creating compelling content.

Whether it’s on Facebook Messenger, their website, or even text messaging, more and more brands are leveraging chatbots to service their customers, market their brand, and even sell their products.

Whether you're just starting out with content marketing or you've been using the same approach for a while, it never hurts to revisit your content strategy plan — to make sure it's up-to-date, innovative, and engaging for your prospects and customers, no matter when or how they intend to buy.

Today's consumers have a lot of power. They can research your product or service and make purchase decisions entirely on their own. Moreover, rather than talking to one of your sales reps, they're more likely to ask for referrals from members of their networks or read online reviews. 

Google said its users want to see the full story and not have to click through to see more. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Posted by LydiaGermanIt’s a common misunderstanding that working with a small budget for SEO means you can’t generate results. How can you possibly make enough improvements to the site in so few hours per month? Well, for us at Tao Digital Marketing, our work with Fleetcover goes to show that results can be achieved by focusing on the most important changes in the little time you have. In this case study, we’ll break down how we increased leads by 751%, keywords by 259% and impressions by 535% on a budget of less than £1,000 / $1,347 per month, equating to one day’s work. That’s a small spend for SEO, but making the right changes at the right time, and focusing our efforts on the most important aspects, generated these positive results. Objectives Our objectives were similar to what every website ultimately wants to achieve: generate leads for the business and increase online visibility for relevant search terms. To be a little more specific, we picked this client up in March 2019, but of course, results generally started to pick up from November 2019 as Google started to crawl the site more regularly. Our targets/KPIs for the next 12 months were based on numbers from April-November 2019, as below: Increase leads from 175 to 500Install a new chat function on the site and gain 50 leads through itIncrease site clicks from 2,200 to 5,000Increase keywords ranked for from 229 to 500The target audience was businesses that need fleet insurance. This spans a wide range of industries, from those operating coaches and taxis through to motor trade. Our strategy focused on technical SEO and content creation. There was one big issue, though: we didn’t build the site ourselves, nor did we have the level of access that would allow us to make any design or fundamental changes that could support SEO and lead generation. In turn, our strategy had to be heavily content-driven. Our strategy 1. Add a chat function In November 2019, we added the ‘TawkTo’ chat function […]

We've all received advance notice of Google's impending page experience update, set to debut this year. But what does "page experience" really mean, and how will it affect B2B sites in particular? You can get the rundown here. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Most B2B marketers say the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a decrease in Marketing-created pipeline of leads, and most also say the pandemic has led to a decrease in their marketing budget. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

How can B2B marketers strategically engage their customers this year? Here are five key customer engagement strategies that can set B2B marketers up for a return to growth in 2021. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

If a tool is used by marketers, does that make it part of the martecfh stack? Where do we draw the line? Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

Did you know that landing pages have the highest conversion rate at 23% than other types of signup forms? It’s true, but landing pages don't convert visitors to leads all by themselves. If they don’t have attractive and compelling offers behind them, they won't generate the leads your sales team is looking for.

Nowadays, significant career shifts are as prevalent as they've ever been. Some people want to assume a different degree of responsibility. Some want to pursue a passion they've put on hold for too long. And some flat-out need a change of pace.

You know LinkedIn — the professional, polished, responsible sibling of the social media sphere. 

Wouldn't it be great if creating infographics was as simple as writing regular old text-based blog posts? Unfortunately, making visual content like this usually takes a lot more time, effort, and let's face it -- skill -- than the written word. Usually. But considering the popularity and effectiveness of visual content in marketing today, you can't just afford to throw in the towel.

Join thousands of senior marketers at online at MarTech, March 16-17, for a FREE expert-led training experience. Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

Posted by CassandraLeeAnneBacklinks continue to be especially valuable for SEO, acting as a signal to search engines that vouches for both the value of your content and the worthiness of your website. In measuring the success of your backlink efforts and informing your future SEO priorities, the data matters. Depending on the tool you use, your results can vary greatly and — in this case — the more data the better. With this in mind, we’re excited to share that Moz has the largest link data set, according to a study done by Perficient. Methodology The link index study was done by Perficient, a respected publicly-traded consulting firm specializing in digital solutions. This award winning firm regularly publishes insightful studies, focused on SEO trends and topics. For this study, Eric Enge, Principal at Perficient, Search Engine Land author, and well-known SEO SME, led the investigation. The study compared 3,000 search queries across the Technology, Health, and Finance market sectors to evaluate the link indexes of Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Majestic. The queries were evenly split across the sectors, and then used to pull results from Google for the top 100 domains. This led to the statistically significant sample size of 85,308 domains. Perficient then used the APIs for all four link indexes and evaluated the results. Perficient also performed manual checks to validate results. Full disclosure: Moz financed the study, but Perficient conducted it independently — the conclusions are 100% their own, with no influence from Moz. "The link graph — the sum total of all of the links that connect the pages on the worldwide web — is the foundation of PageRank and the original Google algorithm. While a lot has changed in 20 years, high-authority links are still a driving force in how Google values and surfaces content. Our goal is to reveal as much of the link graph as possible to understand how Google sees the web and rewards authoritative content, while at […]

Make sure you are paying attention to the local service ads option with Google Ads, even if it is not yet available for your industry. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Filter Link Extensions give advertisers more visibility and the opportunity to tell customers more about their business offerings. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

You need it for networking, job recruitment, downloading resources, transferring files, setting reminders, meeting with colleagues, and so much more.

Think back to the last event you attended. Was it a conference or trade show? An intimate seminar or startup launch party hosted online? How about a fun, socially-distanced 5K or golf outing?

There's a long-established idea that creativity is somehow rooted in chaos: that structure and organization are somehow the enemy of great ideas.

With the rise of marketing software and paid advertising, it's no secret that social media platforms aren't only a place for mutual connection and sharing among strangers — they've also grown into a place where companies can build a brand. 

We know it when we see it, but can we define it? Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

Meet some of the marketing experts who will guide you on your learning journey this February. Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

Meet some of the marketing experts who will guide you on your learning journey this February. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

We also spoke about the old days of the SEO forums, it was a super windy day. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Google automatically calculates the price drop based on changes to your structured data over time. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Google claims FLoC will protect the privacy of users while providing advertisers with needed attribution data. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Posted by MiriamEllisImage credit: Sharon Mollerus A new client comes to your digital marketing agency and says their competitors are stuck to the local packs like mussels cleaved to coastal rock. “How do we edge our way up in Google’s local finder, and find our place above the tideline? We don’t even know where to begin,” the local business owner says. The rough truth is that Google’s local search engine results often don’t make sense at first glance, or even at second or third glances. Local brands are left to puzzle out how to achieve maximum growth when they’re consistently being outranked by sticky competition for their core search phrases. Methodology About a year ago, I decided to run a study in which I’d track a local finder for a single query — “breakfast (X city)” — to see if anything brands or the public did over the course of 12 months would shift the top eatery out of its #1 spot. I chose a small SF Bay Area city where I’m not physically located (to remove the influence of proximity from the mix) and repeated the same query across time to see what we might learn from trying to explain the results at the end of the test period. I did my searches manually and tracked them in a spreadsheet. My anonymized data and takeaways are at the service of your agency as you work to increase local clients’ visibility so that they can achieve optimum growth. Visualizing a year of movement in the local finder Google’s local finder results are paginated in sets of ten. In the following chart, you’ll see the top 10 competitors as they stood in January, moved throughout the year, and finished in December. A total of fifteen brands saw some visibility in the top 10 local finder results over the course of the year, and each brand is represented by its own color. Takeaways 1) Nothing anyone did in 2020 shifted Brand #1 (which I’ll call Tansy) out of its top spot. No amount of links, reviews, photos, posts, category changes or any other […]

The change has SEOs questioning which sites will win and which will lose, but one thing is certain: Nobody is going to stop optimizing for featured snippets. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

With over two billion monthly active YouTube users, YouTube is an undeniably powerful channel for advertising — which means, if you're a YouTube creator, there are plenty of opportunities for you to make money off the platform. 

With a new, modern experience, Google says the redesign is easier to read and use. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

On any given day, most of our email inboxes are flooded with a barrage of automated email newsletters that do little else besides giving us another task to do on our commutes to work -- namely, marking them all as unread without reading or unsubscribing altogether.

In 2016, Facebook released Live video on their platform. As we came into a new decade, it seemed the initial live streaming frenzy on Facebook had calmed down. But today, remote work and digital events are the norm.

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Chrome 88 allows you to view your site’s LCP, FIP, and CLS data in dev tools. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

What functionality would a CDP replace in your marketing stack? Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

The new form and options are much more detailed now, compared to the old method. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

This comes after Google signs an agreement with French publishers to pay for some content. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Posted by CitationLabsGarrett French — founder of Citation Labs and all around link building expert — takes you on a comprehensive walkthrough of guest posting on sites supported by sales. Why is this a good strategy? How do your posts benefit these websites? How do you start and what websites do you reach out to? Watch to find out! Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hello, folks. My name is Garrett French, and I'm a link builder. I run Citation Labs. We have 120 employees, and we build lots of links. Today I am here to reintroduce to you the tactic of guest posting. All right. Very specifically, though, guest posting with a target of publishers — this largest portion here of the publisher pyramid — who are supported by sales, whose main reason of publishing is to sell things. Introduction So let's dig in. We are talking about earned placements. The publishers have to approve this content. There's an editorial gatekeeper. Again, yes/no? Do we want to publish? Do we not? Is it up to our standards? We're talking about real websites with real audiences. We're talking about flexible format. So you can think beyond an article. You can think into an FAQ, for example, or a glossary or something along those lines. Again, very much we want to emphasize the publishers that we're talking about here get their revenue from sales. They're publishing so that they can get new clients or to sell products or services. We're not talking about PBNs. We're not talking about sponsored placements. We're not talking about any circumstance where you have to pay money in order to get in front of somebody's audience. Lastly, I want to point out we're not necessarily talking about op-ed circumstances here. This isn't a branded expertise play. This isn't your chance to show how much you know. Now you're going to be able to show your expertise, but you're going to be second fiddle. You've got to put the […]

This year’s Search Engine Land Award winners for Best SEO Initiative sat down with Search Engine Land’s own George Nguyen to talk SEO tactics and strategies. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Products are never just products, right?

One of the most frequent questions we get from aspiring and current inbound marketers is, "How do you manage all of that content?" When we tell them we use an editorial calendar, the next question is often, "Oh, how much does that cost?"

Losing the occasional customer is an inevitable reality--but it doesn't have to be the end. The right targeted content techniques can both win back people who stopped using your service and ensure they never stray again. Just follow these five steps. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Effective marketing is difficult to get right. Between creative demands, budget limits, and channel decisions, marketers have a lot to juggle when developing their marketing strategy.

Search volume for a range of marketing tactics increased between January 2019 and October 2020, according to recent research from Fractl and SEMRush. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Marketers have found that conversational experiences on landing pages (such as chatbots and live chat) convert three-to-four times more than a traditional landing page. Additionally, a report from Juniper Research predicts that by 2023, the adoption of chatbots across the retail, banking, and healthcare sectors will save businesses $11 billion annually.

In some circles, market research is a catch-all term for asking the industry what it wants. "Do we know what the demand is for this product? Who's even looking for our services? Let me do some market research to find out," someone might say.

Join us online for free at MarTech, March 16-17, to explore essential marketing operations challenges and opportunities. Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

How to change your approach to strategic planning in this fast-moving business environment. Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

When it comes to content, sometimes old school can be a good thing (namely, when it comes to old-school rap or Throwback Thursday on Instagram). But when it comes to your company's public relations strategy, being old school isn't advantageous for your business or your brand. Ten years ago, people still relied on morning papers for news.

Posted by RoyhPlanning and executing SEO strategies for sites with hundreds of millions of pages is no easy task, but there are strategies to make it simpler. Programmatic pages are pages that have been generated automatically on a very large scale. SEO strategies for these pages are used to target multiple keyword variations by creating landing pages at that scale automatically. You’ll typically find these pages in major verticals like e-commerce, real estate, travel, and informational sites. These verticals are relying on programmatic pages to build their SEO strategy, and they have a dedicated page for each product and category. This set up can lead to hundreds of millions of pages — they’re efficient, functional, and user-friendly, however, they do come with some SEO challenges. In my experience, the comprehensive SEO strategy covered in this post works best when tailored to fit a large site with programmatic pages. Many strategies that typically work for sites with only a few hundred pages won't necessarily get the same results on larger sites. Small sites rely on manual and meticulous content creation, compared to programmatic pages, which are the main traffic-driving pages of the site. So, let’s get down to business! I’ll explore the four major SEO challenges you'll encounter when dealing with programmatic pages, and unpack how to overcome them. 1. Keyword research and keyword modifiers Well-planned keyword research is one of the biggest challenges when operating on a programmatic scale. When working on a sizable set of pages and keywords, it’s important to choose and find the right keywords to target across all pages. In order to function both efficiently and effectively, it’s recommended that you divide site pages into a few templates before digging into the research itself. Some examples of these templates could include: Categories Sub-categories Product pagesStatic pages Blogs Informational pages Knowledge base/learningOnce you have […]

Choosing the best organizational structure for your company, division, or team is a lot like picking out a new car. At the most basic level, you're always looking for something road-worthy -- something that can take you (and your passengers) from point A to point B without a hitch.

While Google keeps us on our toes with all the algorithm updates they keep rollin' out, one thing has stayed pretty consistent for inbound marketers looking to optimize their websites for search: keyword research. Well, the need to do keyword research has stayed the same. How you actually do it hasn't.

When it comes to building a memorable brand, it's all about consistency. When you're shopping for your favorite cereal or coffee at the grocery store, you want to be able to spot it from a mile away.

Every once in a while, I'll come across a website that really draws me in. So, I found 32 of them to show you.

The popularity of Agile Marketing is growing, and it's easy to see why: When plans are turned upside down by a black swan event, marketers are naturally drawn to an approach that lets them change course quickly. Here are three tips for adopting Agile methods. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Many of us still rely on traditional content types to drive our content marketing and thought leadership. It's time for that to change: Your company podcast contains all the content you need in easy-to-repurpose conversations. Here's the why and how-to. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Engineers place the most value on information-heavy content, such as datasheets, case studies, and whitepapers, when making purchasing decisions about products and services, according to research from TREW Marketing and GlobalSpec. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

A martech stack featuring Movable Ink and Braze is critical to user engagement. Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

This post is a part of Made @ HubSpot, an internal thought leadership series through which we extract lessons from experiments conducted by our very own HubSpotters. HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan has said it many times: More businesses die each day from overeating than from starvation. They spread themselves across so many different priorities that it becomes impossible to gain major traction with any of them.

The thought of creating your own website may seem overwhelming.

There are a lot of things I used to buy in person that I now buy online. I wouldn't call myself lazy, but it's just so much easier to carry a box of paper towels from my doorstep into my apartment than it is to carry it down the street from my local grocery store. And I'm not alone. Whether it's because of the larger selection, better pricing, convenience, or something else, a lot more people are buying stuff online nowadays instead of in person.

I will argue with alarming confidence (and no actual data) that 90’s kids were the original vloggers.

Facebook groups have helped me find roommates in Boston, potential dog breeders for a family pet, and women's networking opportunities in the nearby area.

When you create and add a compelling call-to-action (CTA) to any content — such as a website, blog post, or social media profile — you have the potential to convert more visitors into qualified leads and customers. That’s because a well-crafted CTA helps increase conversions and, therefore, prospects, customers, and revenue.

When was the last time you ran a competitive analysis for your brand?

Many of us can recall a time in high school when we were sitting in math class and thinking, "When am I ever going to use this stuff in the real world?" And then we suddenly find ourselves in the real world, only to realize that numbers actually do play a pivotal role in what we do -- especially in digital marketing.

"Really? We're talking about QR codes?"

Although it’s a long way from being a Google competitor, DuckDuckGo’s business model may serve as a playbook for new search engines. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Starting a YouTube channel is a lot of work. Not only do you have to spend time scripting, producing, and editing videos, but you also have to find a topic you’re passionate about and make sure it resonates with people.

Many buyers are hesitant to try new B2B tech vendors and products, but they can be persuaded to do so with better pricing, deep experience, innovative solutions, and professional peer reviews, according to research from LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

When I was 14, my dream was to play college baseball. But I had one small problem: I only weighed 100 pounds. And even though I still had four years to bulk up and improve my skills, I knew I had a long way to go. Fortunately, my coach always knew how to give me opportunities to shoot for that kept my drive alive. I think of SMART goals like my former baseball coach.

What's old will be new again in typography during 2021. The Word Counter predicts that classic looks such as serif fonts, psychedelic vibes, and the brutalist aesthetic could make a comeback this year. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Remember the "Tide Pod Challenge?" That horrendous time at the beginning of 2018 when adolescents filmed themselves ingesting laundry detergent?

Does your professional bio make a statement?

Whether you're running a personal blog or managing the official blog on your company's website, monetizing your work is entirely possible -- it just takes a good amount of time and effort.

Your journey to mastering search marketing analytics begins here. Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

Your journey to mastering search marketing analytics begins here. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Google said this is just a reporting change and the change you see in crawling is not reflective of any change in search results. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

We also spoke about how SEO behavior changed around content around both the Panda and Penguin releases. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Sometimes, Excel seems too good to be true. All I have to do is enter a formula, and pretty much anything I'd ever need to do manually can be done automatically. Need to merge two sheets with similar data? Excel can do it. Need to do simple math? Excel can do it. Need to combine information in multiple cells? Excel can do it.

Posted by Dr-PeteI've deleted this introduction twice. To say that no one could've predicted how 2020 unfolded seems trite since we're not even a month into 2021, and this new year has already unraveled. Our challenges in the past year, across the globe, have gone far beyond marketing, and I doubt any of us ended the year the way we expected. This graph from Google Trends tells the story better than I can: The pandemic fundamentally rewrote the global economy in a way none of us has ever experienced, and yet we have to find a path forward. How do we even begin to chart a course in 2021? What do we know? Let's start small. Within our search marketing realm, is there anything we can predict with relative certainty in 2021? Below are some of the major announcements Google has made and trends that are likely to continue. While the timelines on some of these are unclear (and all are subject to change), these shifts in our small world are very likely. Mobile-only indexing (March) Mobile-first indexing has been in progress for a while, and most sites rolled over in 2020 or earlier. Google had originally announced that the index would fully default to mobile-first by September 2020, but pushed that timeline back in July (ostensibly due to the pandemic) to March 2021. If you haven't made the switch to a mobile-friendly site at this point, there's not much time left to waste. Keep in mind that "mobile-first" isn't just about speed and user experience, but making sure that your mobile site is as crawlable as your desktop. If Google can't reach critical pages via your mobile design and internal links, then those pages are likely to drop out of the index. A page that isn't indexed is a page that doesn't rank. Core Web Vitals (May) While this date may change, Google has announced that Core Web Vitals will become a ranking factor in 2021. Here's a bit more detail from the official announcement ... Page experience signals in ranking will roll out in May 2021. The new page […]

Whether you’re working for a small agency or a major marketing firm, you’re probably eventually going to need to fill out a Request for Proposal, or RFP.

The average office worker sends 40 emails per day. That's 40 opportunities to market yourself and your business in those individual emails you send, every single day. A lot of people treat their email signatures like an afterthought, which makes for a real missed opportunity. Those signatures are a chance for you to make it clear who you are, make it easy for people to reach you, and give people a place to go to find out more — either about you, about your business, or about something you're working on.

With all the joy and excitement of landing a new job, you can feel just as much fear and anxiety. The same can go for the hiring manager.

Marketing Margie. Sales Sam. IT Isabel. Accounting Alan. Do you know who your business's buyer personas are? And if so, how much do you know about them?

While many landing pages look different and use a variety of interesting strategies to pull in audiences, they all serve one major purpose. These pages get website visitors to convert to the next stage in the buyer's journey. Rather than serving as a basic advertisement that shows a customer a product, a landing page aims to engage and delight a customer by offering them something that relates to the product or the company's industry. When they fill out the form and receive a reward of interesting content, they might be even more likely to trust your brand and become a customer.Quick tip: Want an easy way to add a form to your landing page? HubSpot’s free form builder tool can help you fill your CRM with leads from your website. Let’s talk through an example of when a landing page can be especially effective. If a business wants to sell an AI product that helps salespeople, they might create a landing page that offers audiences a free video on how to use AI in the sales industry. Interested audiences might offer their contact information in exchange for the valuable information. If they enjoy the video they've received, they might be more likely to respond to or purchase a product from a company rep who calls them. In another scenario, a publishing company that targets an audience of chief executives might create a landing page that invites audiences to sign up for a webinar hosted by an executive at a major company. After giving their email address on the signup form presented on the landing page, the leads get an email with the webinar dates and log in information, as well as instructions on how to sign up for the publication's newsletter or subscription. If the user is pleased by the webinar, they might sign up for the newsletter or a subscription to keep up with similar publication content. Although their purpose is simple enough in theory, actually designing a successful landing page requires some detailed planning and creative testing. Even […]

2020 was — in a word — unprecedented. 

Posted by Nadya_KhojaWe know there are numerous ways to generate B2B sales leads, but let’s face it, the same old methods have been done to death. It’s time to take an unconventional approach to lead generation, especially for B2B companies, because B2B is a different ballgame than B2C — and your strategies need to reflect your audience. As a refresher, here’s how organization goals differ in the B2C versus the B2B sectors: Source: Venngage Before we begin detailing these B2B methods, it’s important to keep in mind that lead generation isn’t a one-and-done deal. You have to be open to A/B testing your strategies and your content. Regularly track your content performance, metrics, conversions, and be ready to improve. So, what are these unconventional methods to generate B2B sales leads? Read on to find out. 1. Tailor content for B2B sales leads B2B content is brand and agency-focused, and you want to create materials that attract attention from that audience. Getting eyeballs on your content won’t mean much if they aren’t converting into customers — those aren’t the right B2B sales leads for your company. How can you tailor your content marketing to the right B2B audience? Buyer personas Most businesses create audience personas to help them reach their target market. In the B2B arena, don’t aim for a company — look for the decision-makers within that company. Every target company will have a few key people who decide which products and services benefit the business. These are the decision-makers your content needs to be tailored to, and for whom you can build buyer personas around, such as this example: Source: Venngage Determine who within a business will most need your product or service, and build your buyer personas based on the following: AgeLocationJob titleLevel in companyPreferred content channelsDesired goalsPain pointsCreate a flow chart with these details to facilitate the content creation process. This also helps you decide […]

LinkedIn launched Marketing Labs video course to teach advertisers how to succeed on the platform. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Just like when I first watched The Matrix, when I initially heard the term "schema markup," I was intimidated by the technical know-how I felt I needed to understand it.

Ten years ago, I couldn't have cared less if the new burger place downtown had a website. Now, I don't trust one that doesn't. If your business is online, you're a part of the digital transformation. But it's not enough these days to just "be online." Businesses that will thrive in 2021 that are operating online — and the COVID-19 pandemic has proved this.